Not Quite Paradise

November 15, 2009
A single mother and her teenage son navigate life and culture in South Asia.

Within days of her sojourn to Sri Lanka in 2001, American-born Barker was met with immense sympathy for her homeland and its citizens—she had arrived just three weeks after 9/11. Feeling the need for a change of pace, Barker sought out teaching assignments and was commissioned to teach 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature to Sri Lankan university students. Her own cultural education of the region began almost immediately. With son Noah in tow, the author settled in the religious town of Kandy, drawing much attention as the"white lady tourist.""Thirteen time zones removed" from her home base, the author immersed herself in the area's customs and traditions, noting special holidays, frequent power outages and wet/dry seasons. The conditions of their ramshackle house included face-offs with ant colonies, geckos, spiders, monkeys, mosquitoes and ravenous rats. Though he'd acclimated adequately to the terrain, Barker constantly fretted about Noah, knowing that she"uprooted him from everything that grounded him." As the center of Buddhist culture on the island, Barker notes that Kandy is full of opportunities for personal prayer and serenity, but she also devotes equal time to the region's great history of civil unrest, the deadly war games that are downplayed in the media to stabilize tourism and the race, language and religious conflicts that have plagued Sri Lanka for decades. Though Barker reports firsthand on the devastation of the 2004 tsunami, her travels are conservatively tepid in comparison to other like-minded travelogues.

Intelligently written but overly timid.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2009
Barker received a Fulbright scholarship for a yearlong teaching stint at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka, 200102. She returned shortly after the tsunami in 2004, in which 30,000 people died in Sri Lanka alone. In this illuminating account, Barker provides glimpses of day-to-day living and teaching in Sri Lanka and describes the devastation caused by the tsunami and the subsequent relief efforts. She chronicles the toll that the civil war in Sri Lanka has taken on the lives of ordinary citizens over the last 26 years, interweaving her narrative with human stories of ordinary Sinhalese and Tamils. Barker relates an engrossing discussion that she led with Jaffna students on Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment". In the midst of trauma, Barker provides captivating accounts about elephants, monkeys, and exotic birds. VERDICT This book will satisfy many nonfiction readers, and there are several contemporary Sri Lankan novels available in English for those whose interest is piqued by this narrative portrait of the country. Highly recommended.Ravi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2010
In 2001, just weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center, Barker packed up herself and her 14-year-old son and traveled to Sri Lanka to teach literature at a university in Kandy. Its a complete change of pace from her life in Tucson, Arizona, from the omnipresent ants she cant seem to drive away from her house to the monkeys that sit in on and often disrupt her lectures. As she adjusts to life in Kandy, she learns more about the history of the country, and the civil war between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, triggered in the wake of the British departure from the island. At the time of her arrival, the war had already claimed over forty thousand lives. Barker eventually returns to the U.S. with her son, but when the devastating tsunami hits the day after Christmas in 2004, she is drawn back to Sri Lanka. Rich in the tales of Sri Lanka under colonial British rule as well as coverage of the current civil war, Barkers memoir is an enlightening and captivating read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)